You know your game is pretty much the hottest thing since a burrito on the sun when you send out a press release about airing a television commercial and have everyone slobber over the news.

Anyway, Microsoft will be airing an ad for Halo 3 during ESPN's Monday Night Football this Monday night.
The ad will air, roughly, between 8:50 and 9:30 P.M. eastern standard time. If you miss the ad, it will be made available through Xbox.com on December 5.

H3 Enterprises, a conglomerate merging hip-hop music and entertainment-related business enterprises, will be pitting the Xbox 360 against the PlayStation 3 at a special event held on December 6 in Harlem, N.Y.'s. Apollo Theater.

The event is meant to promote H3 and its new megaTV, a 46-inch monster that allows for split-screen play. Attendees will get to play the same game on different consoles on one H3TV so they can decide which console is superior.

Microsoft is throwing what it believes to be the world's biggest piñata party ever this Saturday. And you're invited.

The event will be held at the Santa Monica pier on December 2, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. In addition to a 35-foot-tall piñata, activities for everyone, lots of free prizes, and chances to both play the Viva Piñata game and stare at its accompanying Saturday morning cartoon, the event will also have a special guest host...

Wired has this to say about the filmmaker: "Like a modern-day Ed Wood, or a poor man's Michael Bay, Boll appears competent in every aspect of filmmaking except the actual making of the film. His movies are haphazardly scripted, sloppily edited, badly acted and, most crucially, brutally received."

Now, we can add amateur sadist to Boll's list of credits. The man, a trained boxer, decided to beat up nerds to prove his movies were, in fact, great. "I hit them so hard, they have brain damage," Boll proclaimed after he'd finished lumping up his critics—including a 17-year-old boy. "They love my movies now!"

The space age RPG has an almost real-time conversation system where you can input a character's responses while someone else is talking. And it's got a storyline pitting man against machine that's going to sweep across the breadth and width of three games for the Xbox 360.

November 28, 2006

Viva Piñata lets you build a garden and raise party favors. It's the dumbest premise ever, but the game is so wonderfully cute and open-ended (yet still features whacking with shovels so you aren't wholly emasculated), it's like a giant vacuum from which no time can escape.

I am on level 23 now. I have bred, and I have a pruned, and I have planted the Hazlenut tree. God help me, but I bought a hat for a video monkey. And even now I am telling myself to type faster because I am so incredibly close to level 24 I can taste it.

I saw my old man play Wii the other day. He both bowled and golfed in Wii Sports, and seemed to have a right good time doing it.

My dad isn't necessarily a stranger to videogames. He watches me play them a lot, and likes to laugh, say, when I play Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 and the womens' breasts heave and sway like Jell-O served on the North Atlantic during the perfect storm. Once upon a time, he even reviewed a game for the defunct Web site DailyRadar.com, possibly the finest 800 or so words ever written by a former paper factory man on the subject of Sega Marine Fishing for the Sega Dreamcast.

Now, color me peach and black—and color me taken aback—but any system that offers games such as Letter Zap and Lock 5 (a word search and safe-cracking game, respectively), shouldn't necessarily be marketed as an alternative to one that plays games that are, you know, fun. But maybe I just live in Crazytown and drink the oddly flavored Kool-Aid all day.

"Whatever the occasion, your family room is guaranteed to come alive with laughter, conversation and friendly competition," the Game Wave Web site proclaims. I'm just not sure if the Game Wave is out of its box when this is happening.

November 27, 2006

Why no one has made a videogame about The Haunted Tank, I do not know. Nor do I care as long as this egregious error is not rectified immediately.

The Haunted Tank is—and I am not making this up— a comic book from the 1960s about a tank soldier in World War II. His name is Jeb Stuart and, not surprisingly given his name, he is the ancestor of Civil War general Jeb Stuart. Jeb, now a ghost, returns from beyond the grave to assist his namesake in his war against Nazi oppression.